


And I Sound Beautiful

by communistkosuzu



Category: Touhou Project
Genre: Alcohol, Gender Identity, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:54:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24369925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/communistkosuzu/pseuds/communistkosuzu
Summary: Renko has been dreaming about a shrine maiden from a faraway land and wishes to be her. (CW: self-harm thoughts, gender identity, vomit, mild alcohol references)
Relationships: Hakurei Reimu/Yakumo Yukari, Maribel Hearn/Usami Renko
Comments: 7
Kudos: 59





	And I Sound Beautiful

I used to dream that I was a shrine maiden in a faraway world. This shrine maiden me had a melodious, sonorous voice and I envied her for that. She also looked kinda cute, but that’s beside the point. Lately, the frequency of the dreams made me begin seeing myself as her and it was the best thing ever: I would soar into the skies and battle the various mythical creatures with magical bullets. Other friends would join in, shoot out delicate patterns of bullets that look like fireworks, and we would have so much fun.

But once the day was over, I would sweep the autumn leaves away and ponder about what to do with the finances of the crumbling shrine. A troublesome witch would wave me goodbye before flying into the evening sun. Now, I’m alone and letting myself feel the world around me. I’d shiver when the breeze entered through my clothes.

Then, a mist formed around me. Something opened from behind and space and sound were sucked into it. Suddenly, I was hugged by a spirit that I instinctively knew as menacing.

“Guess who it is~”

“No.”

“I’m supposed to be teasing you,” #@*()! said before kissing the nape of my neck, “but you’re the one toying with my heart.”

“If youkai have hearts, then I’m going to stop drinking alcohol.”

“That will be good for you. Too much of it ruins your liver.”

“Do youkai have livers? How much do they sell for?”

“That’s a secret!”

I felt #@*()!’s arms around me. I missed that feeling so much, but I also felt an ounce of anger welling up within me.

“Why are you like this anyway?” I said, “You’d disappear for months without a trace. I was worr -- um, I was wondering where you went!”

“You know me, I was sleeping.”

“Get an alarm clock.”

“Alarm clocks disturb my dreams. Those dreams can be very pretty.”

“I just want you to be with me.”

#@*()! brushed her nose into my hair and nipped on my ear.

“That hurts.”

“You’re cute.”

“Now, you’re mocking me.”

“You have a beautiful voice and I want to hear it more.”

“I don’t understand what you’re on about. I just feel empty without you.”

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t. You have no idea how much I want you.” I try to shake her away from me, but she’s still latching onto me. “And it’s a lost cause anyway. If I disappear like how you do that with me, you’ll probably not care about what happened to me.”

“I do. Even if you are someone else, I will still look for you.”

I looked up at the evening sun and wanted this moment to last forever.

I could tell there was more to this conversation, but the dream ended there. My eyelids would open and I would be looking at the familiar cracked dorm ceiling. Beside me was Merry sleeping on me. She’s snoring peacefully and I’d wonder if she’s whisked away to another world again.

I would get out of bed and reflect on how strange and familiar that dream was. My throat's parched, so I would go to the restroom and get a glass of water.

While drinking the water, I looked at myself.

I was no shrine maiden. Nothing about me looked the part and I didn’t sound as adorable anyway.

But I sometimes wondered if I could be like that shrine maiden someday...

* * *

“Renko,” Merry says, “when are we gonna get lovey-dovey again?”

I slam down a pile of documents and say, “After we finish up compiling this series of articles.”

“That’s gonna take forever!”

“Your fault for procrastinating! I want to be lovey-dovey with you, but we’re the only people who’ve seen this other world.”

Merry pouts and says, “Alright...”

The two of us are the founding (and only) members of a university club that specializes in the occult. To oversimplify things, Merry is writing stories about the world she’s seen and I’m helping with the editing. We’ve been distributing her material on the web and many specialists have written heaps of praise and accolades on our work.

However, we’ve not revealed our identities to the public. That’s been a real problem. Many people are plagiarizing our work and there’s even questions probing into our authenticity too. For a while, we’ve been wondering aloud if we should go public because it’d be easier to handle PR stuff like that...

Honestly, I’d like Merry to be more known. I’m just her assistant anyway.

“I remember this story!” Merry says, “Having teatime with that girl and her dolls... What’s her name...”

“Yeah, yeah. Stop slacking about.”

As always, we’re in our small clubroom in the library and this room rental is courtesy of Professor Yumemi. For whatever reason, she’s been interested in our esoteric work and like to ask us about what we’ve seen. She’s the only one who knows of our encounter with this other world.

“You know, we could become bigger.” Merry looks up from her work and grins at me. “Let’s turn what we have into a podcast.”

“Huh?”

“I recently read that kids these days don’t read books. They’d rather listen to something.”

“People have been saying that since the beginning of time,” I say, “I bet this was still true in the year 2020. That’s like ages ago.”

“This time, it’ll be different! We’re voicing something occult and cool. Also, we’d kill two birds with one stone: we become popular and the plagiarism problem goes away!”

“Uh-huh. And what do you mean by _we_?”

“We, as in you and me!”

I grimace. “I don’t want to do it. It’s weird hearing your voice, you know. Have you tried it before?”

Merry shakes her head. “I just assume I sound the same to you.”

“I don’t remember the science behind it, but your voice definitely sounds different from what you hear. It’s because of the pressure and vibrations you feel, I think.”

“You sure know everything, don’t you?”

I frown and say, “Well, I looked into it, I guess.”

“I think your voice is fine,” she says. “It will be interesting to read it aloud.”

“You think so? Could be interesting, I guess. But first” -- I point to the documents -- “let’s start collating this.”

“Noooooooo...”

Merry starts squirming and she stretches herself out on the table before pretending to sleep. She’s so cute unlike me. I sigh but also acknowledge that every day with Merry is always fun.

“Renko, you’re cute too...”

“Hm?”

Merry looks up and makes a serious face that looks too comical to me.

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, ‘I’m not cute.’”

“Not really.”

Merry sighs before saying, “When will you realize you are cute?”

“Right, right,” I say as I pick up half of the papers and weigh them down on Merry’s head. “Flattery leads you nowhere.”

“It’s the truth and you know it...”

* * *

“Testing... Testing... Yo Renko, I did it!”

Merry’s talking to her microphone attached to her smartphone. It looks so weird seeing a bulky thing attached to something so mobile. I asked her to plug the microphone into the PC, but Merry’s stubborn and said we’re a post-PC generation.

“Everything’s all about smartphones, okay!”

Either way, Merry’s installed the voice editing software on the phone. She seems pleased that she’s able to do all this by herself.

“Well, here’s the script,” I say, putting it on the table. “Just some minor deviations from the material we have. Should be podcast material, I think,”

I omit the part that I stayed up late to listen to different podcasts yesterday, so I can figure out what format we should go for. I don’t want Merry to worry about me too much.

“Let’s read the first page of the script then,” I say.

“Sure!”

We both read the script out. We’re still unused to speaking into a microphone and we sometimes break into nervous laughter over the cheap jokes I’ve made in the script. Merry would chatter a bit and then lose where she was on the script while I made sure my intonation was correct.

I want to make sure everything sounds fine to me. I guess I’m a perfectionist on this front.

“There,” Merry says as she sighs with relief and twists a bottle cap open, “that was a nice first take!”

“Did take a while.”

“Wanna hear it over? I wonder if I fumbled with my lines...”

“You definitely did,” I say. “You were enunciating words pretty loudly and I think the microphone picked it up.”

Merry drinks her water bottle till it’s empty and then for comedic timing, she says, “Oh no.”

“Well, we won’t know properly until we play it. How are we going to listen to it?”

“This smartphone is incredible,” Merry says, “we can have two headphones in one jack.”

“Oh, you mean you bought those those weird multi-jack set for headphones from the internet. Yeah, those work well.”

“Stop ruining the surprise! Go plug it in, gosh.”

We attach our headphones to the phone and sit together closely. Merry presses the play button and smiles at me.

I hear Merry’s soothing voice speak in recorded form..

MERRY

Welcome to our very first episode of the p-podcast,

I pause and say, “You stuttered.”

Merry glances to me and says, “We can fix that in post-op!”, before clicking resume.

MERRY

Hifuu Club! I’m Merry and --

RENKO

)_2133(!$!@$321312%%@!$%!

Huh?

MERRY

We want to present you our most interesting findings of this other world we’re able to go to. It’s such a fascinating world that makes me go kyaa~

RENKO

dajskldjksaljdas90e7801927312

Merry says, “You’re right: hearing your own voice is really strange. It’s kinda amazing. I sound like a dehydrated gorilla.”

MERRY

Yeah, that’s why we’re going to --

RENKO

ASDAASD!$!@()!$@!%)!@%@!

I start blinking nonstop. My forehead is perspiring more than usual. I swallow saliva and then feel my throat with my hands.

MERRY

Ahh, there’s this story that --

My breaths begin to be erratic. I feel dizzy. I grip my throat tightly.

RENKO

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

“What’s the matter? D-Do you feel ill?”

RENKO

!#(_!@##!#!@#@!

MERRY

You said that right!

I let out an “ugh” sound.

RENKO

!@#!@$$123$$%^

My head feels heavy.

RENKO

I’M RENKO

N-No, you’re not.

RENKO

I’M RENKO AND I SOUND LIKE THIS

No, no. No.

RENKO

@#!#!(_!@#@!#@!#!%

The voice in the earphones merges with mine. I start to recognize how ugly that voice sounds, how disgusting that voice sound, how vomit-inducing that voice sounds, how how how how....

RENKO

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I scream at the top of my lungs and fall down from my chair. My head crashes into the wall and I jolt from the sudden pain.

“Renko? W-What’s wrong?”

I look up at Merry who is panicking and trying to get me up. Her face is so close to me and yet, I feel like I am being sucked into somewhere far away. My vision is getting blurry and the numbing pain in the back of my head is traveling through my spine. Her sweet voice from the headphones is still echoing inside my skull.

But _that_ voice ... keeps clashing with hers. It’s slurring and fusing into hers. I don’t want to hear. I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to.

I want to vomit.

I start to belch and my throat feels hot and constricted. I know it’s coming up.

“Can someone call an ambulance? Please?!” Merry’s shrieks are fading away. “I don’t know what’s happened to Renko!”

RENKO

OH MERRY... I LOVE YOU SO MUCH

The voice keeps saying things. Things that I have said. Things that I have said to Merry in my ugly, disgusting voice.

That voice is mimicking my words to mock me and my love for Merry.

I let out the bile that’s burning my throat and tongue onto the floor. Merry starts flailing her hands as someone drags her away from me.

“RENKO!”

My body muscles start to cramp. I feel my upper body jerk up and thus pull the cables attached to the multi-jack to fly off the jack, causing the voice and Merry’s to be played loudly on the phone.

I could hear _his_ voice explode in the room. He makes my head hurt so much. I want him to stop talking. Please, please. Please cut out your throat. Shut up. I want to stab that throat and make it stop. I don’t want to hear that voice anymore.

I don’t want to hear him say, “I love you, Merry,” in that putrid, abhorrent voice.

I try to get up, but raising my hand takes so much effort that I just give up. My body feels drained of energy. I don’t know how many seconds have passed, but I can barely recognize that tall figures are surrounding me. My body is lifted up and I can tell I am being moved somewhere.

The voice recording in the smartphone finishes and soft cries from Merry begin to fill in the room.

The last thing I see as my concentration starts to dissipate away is Merry covering her face with her hands. I’ve been with her long enough to realize that she’ll do this when she’s blaming herself for something she didn’t do.

I can’t tell what she is crying about. I want to tell her that she didn’t do anything wrong, but I don’t know what happened.

All I remember is the coarse croaking that’s supposed to be my voice.

* * *

When I woke up on the hospital bed, I cried.

I was a nuisance to everyone in the hospital, I realize, but I just felt like crying. I couldn’t appreciate how my classmates and even professors took the time to visit me because I just cried forever.

The nurses would tell me to cheer up, but they would be exhausted in dealing with me crying forever. I had to be moved to an emptier room because I kept crying and disturbing other patients’ sleep.

I know I shouldn’t cry, but I couldn’t help it.

The voice made me sick.

By the time I’ve come to my senses, it is lunch time. A nurse who is muttering how I’m such a crybaby has just finished preparing my food. The skin around my eyes feel dull because I’ve been rubbing it for a while.

A knock on the wall and a gentle swing of the door -- a familiar voice whistles through the room: “Am I disturbing Renko?”

“It looks like _he’s_ stopped crying,” the nurse says with a frown. “I would’ve appreciated if that happened ages ago.”

Merry waltz in with a basket of fruits while the nurse walks out.

“Hello Renko,” she says as she sits on the chair beside me, “how are you?”

“I wish I knew,” I say, trying to ignore the deep and low pitch of my voice.

“I know Professor Yumemi tried to visit you, but --”

“I think I made her mad.” I vaguely remember that the professor tried to give me back my hat, but I slapped it away from her. ”I wasn’t thinking straight.”

“Sorry, I wish I visited you earlier. I was just ... shocked, I think.”

“It’s fine.”

Merry takes an apple from the basket and says, “Is it fine if I cut you a slice? I don’t know what the doctors said, so --”

“Should be fine. I could use an apple to go with my lunch.”

“It doesn’t look appetizing.” Merry smirks as she takes out a knife and starts cutting away the skin. “Figured some fruits would make it better.”

“If hospital food looked good, I would know I’ve been transported to another world.”

Merry giggles. She tries to cover her embarrassing laughter by cupping her mouth with her hand and I always thought it was a cute gesture.

If only I could do it...

“Renko, I -- I want you to feel better about yourself.”

I look into Merry’s watery blue eyes, now bursting with passion and feeling.

“I don’t know what exactly you’re going through,” she continues while presenting the apple slice to me, “but know that I’m always here for you.”

“I wish,” I say as I bite into it, “I wish I were someone else.”

“How come?”

I munch the apple slice in contemplation before saying, “Do you remember the time we traveled to that giant lake and watch the fairies frolic around?”

“Yes, that was such a lovely time. We were chased by that blue fairy and thought she was scary.” She is smiling as she reminisces and I swallow the apple slice. “Then, you struck a match in the nick of time and she became frightened instead. It was really funny.”

“I wish I were a fairy like her.” In my foggy mind, I am trying to visualize that puny and overconfident _feminine_ figure again. “It must be nice to not care about the world ... and your body.”

“Renko...”

I look down at my body. My chest has _nothing_ and I feel with my fingers that I’ve grown a small stubble on my chin. Everything about me is not who I imagine myself to be.

I desperately want to be someone else ... like that shrine maiden.

“Merry, I hate myself.”

I’ve finally let out those four words, which have been on my mind since Merry and I started dating.

“Don’t say that, please.”

Merry drops the apple and hugs me. I hear the apple roll away from us and Merry’s sniffling. I’ve always been jealous how emotional she can get. I’m not allowed to do that because I’m ... _that_.

“I’m so sorry,” Merry says, “I shouldn’t have made you --”

“For the first time,” I say, “I realize I am a guy and I don’t know what to feel about that.”

I grew up in a household that never taught me what masculinity and femininity were. I watched anime and read manga that were supposed to be for girls apparently. Nobody told me there were borders around them. If I knew about them, maybe I’d respect those borders more.

But I transgressed those borders all the time when I was young. I had a different impression of myself from other people. When I played with dolls, all the boys around me laughed. I ended up playing with the girls and felt more comfortable there.

As I grew older, the girls thought I was a creep. Why the hell are you playing with dolls, they said, go back to the guys, they said. So I did and now I’m told by the men around me that we should buff up and talk about how much they’d want to fuck females. I was weirded out, but my parents who now worried about my feminine behavior told me I should start adopting more masculine habits.

I tried to emulate what people saw as manly. I pretended to enjoy violent movies and video games like my other “guy friends”, but I also couldn’t be too close because that’d be too gay. When a “guy friend” heard the music I listened to, he called me a word I don’t want to reiterate and told me to listen to better music. I tried to listen to his music, but all I heard was noise and rage.

That was when I realized these were the sounds of people I didn’t want to have.

When these singers started screaming into the microphone about how much they hated women despite craving for them, I thought that was so dissonant with what I want from life that I had to stop listening to it. Else, I could go mad. I didn’t want to have that voice. 

Later on, I learned that trans men exist and while I sympathized with their longing to be of another gender, I cannot fully empathize with their cause. I’ve lost any faith in any form of masculinity.

I just don’t want to have that voice -- that voice that spews toxicity and makes me want to punish myself.

What is even gender? Why are men forced to hide their feelings and women display them for the public to watch? Why must people need to resist what is given to them in order to be someone else?

Why do I want to be someone else?

“Renko, you’re crying.”

I look down, aware that these spirals of thoughts will never end. No one has answered these questions satisfactorily. Everyone has to look for their own answer. But I can’t. The teardrops made of my struggles to make sense of myself fall onto my hand and slide off to the side.

Merry holds my rough, masculine hands.

“Do you remember the time we met?”

I glance at Merry who is doing her best to break into a smile.

“We were in our freshman seminar. Everyone was doing their thing, but you were there just reading a book. You were so aloof then. When I called you over, you looked up as if I was a ghost. Then, you went back to the book.”

My mind starts forming hazy images of a Merry approaching me.

“When we got to know each other more, I was really happy we shared so much in common. Our childhood shows were the same. The books we read are so similar. I thought I would never meet anyone like me unless I cloned myself!”

I begin picturing the time we were holding hands in the cinema and we’re watching an anime adaptation of a manga we liked.

“I used to think how the world felt harsh and desolate. Each ripple and tear I see in the fabric of the world, I think about how it will all just collapse. I think about those eyes emerging from the holes and how they want to invite us. If we let them engulf us, maybe the world will be peaceful because it’d be empty. I thought it was the only way this world could go because there’s nothing beautiful in it.”

I feel her hands tighten her grip on mine.

“Until I met you.”

She gasps for air and exclaims,

“You are the most beautiful person I’ve ever met.”

My hands tremble.

“You are what makes this world beautiful to me,” Merry says. “That’s why you are important to me.”

My lips quiver.

“So please, love yourself. Love yourself like how I love you.”

I feel something warm on my cheeks. The sounds in the hospital room fall to a silence. My heart beats -- it beats with pain at first, but it then resonates with a tenderness that inundates all of my body.

I let my last teardrop fall and can only smile. 

Merry draws away from me and grins.

I plunge in to kiss her on the lips.

* * *

#@*()!

My dream is to love you for who you are.

#@K(R!

I want you to be who you want to be.

Y@K(RI

I will love you no matter who you are.

YUKARI

I will look for you because you are the person of my dreams.

REIMU

I hope I can see that dream someday, Yukari. It sounds beautiful.

* * *

For my birthday, Merry’s brought some clothes for me to try out. I shake my head in despair because I don’t think I would look good in them...

“Come on,” she says, “I have very good fashion sense.”

She ushers me into the restroom to try out these clothes. I sigh as I try to remember what the video tutorials told me about trying these kinds of clothes on.

When I come out of the door, Merry’s eyes sparkles.

“You look so good. I swear I’m becoming so jealous of you.” She snaps a photo of me on her phone and shows how I look. “HRT’s doing miracles for you.”

“T-Thank you.” My voice cracks when I see my photo. “I guess, I guess I look cute.”

“Right? And your voice sounds good too.”

I nod. It’s been my third month working on my voice. I’ve gotten comfortable hearing it recorded and we’ve been progressing with the podcasts for our club. People have thought my voice was feminine recently and it’s flattering, even though I don’t think I am anywhere close to that.

“Oh,” she says, “you must be thinking you’re not anywhere close to a woman, right? I know that face. Cut it out.”

“But I --”

“You’re damn cute. That’s all what matters.” Merry huffs in confidence. “I’m proud to have a _girlfriend_ like you.”

My cheeks blush. We’ve been going out like this for a few weeks now and at first, people thought I was a weirdo before Merry stared at others back. Now, it’s gotten so normal that I not only feel comfortable but feel more relaxed than ever.

“Say,” Merry says, “why don’t we get gay in bed later?”

“W-What? Why are you like this? What happened to the cute Merry?”

“I’ve always been like that! You probably just didn’t notice!”

Merry feels happier with me nowadays. She used to be gloomy, but I think that’s because she was worried about me. I was always moody when we dated. Now that gender identity is becoming less of a problem for me, she gets to toy with me more without making it awkward for the both of us.

As I awkwardly pose for Merry to take more pictures, I wonder if this is all but a dream. A small but creeping fear lurches in the background: maybe I will wake up and realize it’s all a fantasy. Happy things can’t possibly happen to me and yet, here I am.

This is the first time I thought I was one with the world.

But will this dream one day cease to be?

“What’s the matter, Renko?”

“I’m thinking how this is a dream come true.”

“Of course, it’s a dream. Dreams are things to be made into reality!”

I see her smile flower into a new world.

Within that new world rises possibilities: to be a fairy, to be a youkai, to be a human living in the utopia of the forgotten past. I can hear the sounds of their chuckles in bliss.

And I see the shrine maiden in the skies. She glances back at me. I am watching _myself_ smile.

“I want to hear your true voice,” Merry says. “Can I hear it?”

"Yes," I say, "and I sound beautiful.”

  
  



End file.
